“This Gitmo-detainee released to Afghanistan is infuriating...different in a way than the guys who go back to Yemen or Saudi to rejoin Al Qaeda after the bs Saudi rehab program. This guy is released into a warzone, where our soldiers and Marines are fighting, and where he can directly rejoin the enemy.”

Reports from Pakistan indicate that Adam Gadahn, the U.S. traitor who serves as a spokesman for al Qaeda, has been captured in Karachi. The Pakistani government has not confirmed the arrest, but this does look promising. Gadahn has issued videos for years, and his latest released just today has praised Major Nidal Hasan, the Muslim U.S. Army officer who murdered 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2009. Gadhan described Hasan as "a pioneer, a trailblazer and a role-model who has opened a door, lit a path and shown the way forward for every Muslim who finds himself among the unbelievers."

Why bother fighting off an administration hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president? I could have easily decided to hide out, as others have. Instead, I wrote numerous articles (several published in this newspaper) and three books explaining and defending presidential control of national security policy. I gave dozens of speeches and media appearances, where I confronted critics of the administration's terrorism policies. And, most importantly, I was lucky to receive the outstanding legal counsel of Miguel Estrada, one of the nation's finest defense attorneys, to attack head-on and without reservation, each and every one of OPR's mistakes, misdeeds and acts of malfeasance.

I did not do this to win any popularity contests, least of all those held in the faculty lounge. I did it to help our president—President Obama, not Bush.

The minority leader blasts the president's law-enforcement approach to terrorism.

Earlier today at the Heritage Foundation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a speech on the many flawed policies of the Obama administration’s approach to terrorism, paramount among them, “that terrorism should be treated as a law-enforcement matter.”

McConnell then pointed out that the administration’s failure with respect to the Christmas Day bomber—from not acting on intelligence it received from the boy’s father to mirandizing him immediately after he attempted to blow up an airliner over U.S. soil—should not have shocked anyone. This is, McConnell concluded, merely the logical conclusion, the “practical consequences,” of a pre-9/11 mentality that considers terrorism a crime, not an act of war.

On day of State of the Union address.

The top Republicans in the Senate are preparing a scathing letter to Attorney General Eric Holder concerning the handling of the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The letter, signed by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and top Republicans on committees with national security jurisdiction, accuses the Obama administration of a "preoccupation with reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights."

According to a draft obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the letter raises pointed questions about the attempted attack and the botched response by the Obama administration and the intelligence community.

Abdullah Said al Libi is dead.

Al Qaeda has taken credit for the suicide attack that killed seven CIA operatives, including a station chief, and a Jordanian intelligence operative. In a statement released on the Internet, Mustafa Abu Yazid, al Qaeda's leader in Afghanistan, said the attack was to "avenge" the leaders and "brothers" of al Qaeda and the Taliban killed in the U.S. airstrikes in Pakistan.

More than 100 former detainees may be back on the battlefield.

Press reports indicate that the latest Pentagon assessment of recidivists who were once held at Guantanamo “shows about one in five detainees released” have returned to terrorism. That, of course, is a recidivism rate of “about” 20 percent.

From the November 10, 2003 issue: We've made military strides against al Qaeda. Next step: Iraqi democracy.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Donald Rumsfeld's memo on the "Global War on Terrorism" has elicited derision and glee from many in the press and the Democratic party. The publicly upbeat, brusque secretary appears in the in-house memorandum far more pensive and tentative in his judgments about America's--specifically the Pentagon's--success in its battle against Islamic holy-warriorism.

"We are having mixed results with [Osama bin Laden's] al Qaeda," Rumsfeld confesses. "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. . . .

From the October 20, 2003 issue: The case for the war in Iraq, with testimony from Bill Clinton.

"When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N.

From the October 6, 2003 issue: In making the case for the war, he downplays his strongest argument: America's duty.

ON IRAQ the administration likes to talk interest, not duty. "We did ourselves and the world a favor." But interest is always arguable; duty can be absolutely clear. Torture, mass murder, and hellish tyranny make for the clearest case possible. Yet too often the administration has sounded hesitant and defensive on Iraq. It has a compelling, open-and-shut moral case but prefers to make pragmatic arguments about global terrorism and Arab politics. Of course security is important, but mass murder is even more important.

It's the last valid argument against war, it's the budding core of a new international coalition, and it's still wrong.

OVER THE COURSE of the last few months, every respectable argument against war in Iraq has fallen apart. In December the peaceniks insisted that inspections would work; even Hans Blix now admits that they have not. In January the peaceniks insisted that the United States was acting unilaterally; then a group of European nations stepped shoulder-to-shoulder with America and the ranks of support have since swelled.

The coming war in Iraq is not one of necessity, it is, like our Civil War, a war of choice.

ONE REASON the coming war disturbs many Americans is that it seems optional. While the fight in Afghanistan was thrust upon us, this conflict is one our country enters by choice. It is a war we wouldn't be undertaking but for the conviction of our leaders--crucially, our president.

But in that, it is not unique in the American experience. If Afghanistan was like World War II in being a war of necessity, Iraq is like the Civil War in being a war of leadership and conviction.

It is easy to forget how optional the Civil War seemed to many at the time.

Many of the liberal converts to the war agree with the president--they just can't bring themselves to admit that he's right.

WE ARE NOW just weeks away from going to war to disarm and depose Saddam Hussein's regime, and beginning the difficult but necessary task of bringing the fresh breezes of self-government into the authoritarian hothouses of the Arab world. The arguments of the antiwar protestors--to the extent they even bother making arguments more sophisticated than placards reading "Bush = Hitler"--are refuted easily enough, and fortunately they've only strengthened the resolve of George W.

When it comes to homeland security, some questions are better left unanswered and some scenarios left unexplored.

FROM THE MOMENT listeners realized that terrorism had come to America, callers to my radio program have wanted to discuss various terrorism scenarios. Invariably the conversation begins, "If I was a terrorist, here's how I'd paralyze the country . . ."

Then I cut them off. It is a conversation with no upside other than ratings, and perhaps a little--or even more than a little--risk. Why advertise vulnerability, and why encourage paranoia?

Last week I called some local law-enforcement types to press them on the mechanics of homeland defense.